Scoble debates on whether services such as Twitter should charge their “super-users”. An interesting thought, and it’s not so different to the underlying idea behind Freemium services.

Charging “super-users” might be viable in some situations, but I wonder if the same is true of “super-advocates” on networks. You could argue that Twitter extracts huge value from the super-advocacy of folk like Scoble. Why would they want to charge him? Surely they should reward him with a set of power tools for the service…

The debate moves onto architecture but I don’t seriously think that you could make a viable consumer proposition around the idea of: we have a busted architecture, so we’ll have to charge you for our services. (Sounds like the kind of software I’d make…)

When I think about Freemium services, they make sense when I use one (say, Flickr). $30 per year, no sweat. But when I add a few more: web-hosting, anything from 37signals, maybe even MobileMe :) then actually the cost suddenly begins to become an issue – even if it remains relatively small.

This is maybe not an issue for me personally being the hyper-connected soul that I am, but may create an overall barrier to growth for the Freemium economy in terms of mass-market penetration.

On the other hand, as the ‘alpha-geek’ of my family network a reasonable business model might be to charge me but allow me to provide the same privileges to my family (x users), playing to my super-user capability and also my (super-)advocacy in telling my networks about the service. I assert that this will matter over time as the various social-network models attempt to hold onto your data.

A simple example: since Evan was born, my entire family now use Flickr to keep up to date with her growth– some have even signed up for the Freemium service. Small fry additions to the user base of course, but not in the context of the overall set of super-users.

(I hesitate to say I’m the ‘alpha-geek’ of my social network as of course most of my friends are techies – which reminds me of a line: “Statistically speaking, half of your friends are below average”. But I digress…)

I guess the point is that while there’s money in all those advertising plays, we’re in the early days of business models that will be successful quickly, and those that will be successful over time.

There's been some really useful updates to the DeepZoom Composer that means that it will now generate some boilerplate code - a web page and a bunch of mouse and keyboard event handling so you can enjoy your compositions right away.

That's very useful by itself, but it also means that it suddenly becomes very easy to host your composition on Silverlight Streaming. Here's how:

Sign up for a Silverlight Streaming account if you don't have one.

Next, create your composition in DeepZoom Composer. Once you're happy with it, you can run the Export, and 'Preview in Browser'.

If you've accepted the export defaults, then you'll typically find the output web project, XAML and code at:

C:\Users\<User>\Documents\Expression\Seadragon Projects\<My Project Name>\source images\OutputSdi\<My Export Name>\

Using the solution in this folder means you can edit the output and maybe make something more complex, or integrate with another application.

But for upload into Silverlight Streaming, we can look in a folder further down the folder tree:

C:\Users\<User>\Documents\Expression\Seadragon Projects\<My Project Name>\source images\OutputSdi\<My Export Name>\DeepZoomOutput_Web\ClientBin

This folder contains the compiled XAP file, and a folder with all of the generated images from DeepZoom Composer. First, we need to add a file that Silverlight Streaming understands: Manifest.xml.

The Manifest.xml file should look something like follows (where source, width and height should be set as desired):

<SilverlightApp>
  <version>2.0</version> 
  <source>DeepZoomOutput.xap</source> 
  <width>1400</width> 
  <height>1400</height> 
  <background>white</background> 
  <isWindowless>false</isWindowless> 
  <framerate>24</framerate> 
</SilverlightApp>

Once this file is added, before zipping, my folder looks like:

Now we can zip together the Manifest.xml, XAP file, and images folder, and we're good to upload to Silverlight Streaming, and then to embed the content into blog pages.

Here's one I made earlier.

Through the magic of DeepZoom, you can zoom into Simon's eye and see what he's really thinking...

(Dammit Jim, I'm a tech not a photographer)

I quite enjoyed Architect Insight this year - lots of useful sessions, and in particular the keynotes - which were mainly thinking about the issues surrounding the delivery and scaling of cloud services - were engaging and interesting.

If you were there, hopefully you enjoyed my session with Paul Dawson from Conchango - thanks very much Paul! - thinking about user experience for consumers and enterprise users.

The main things I took away this year:

• AtomPub is important. There's a lot of standardisation of Microsoft services on AtomPub and it seems to me that it will be increasingly important to understand and use this.
• POA. A new acronym: "Pod-Oriented Architecture". A Pod is defined as a unit in a datacenter capable of running an entire cloud service. So, to scale out, you just keep adding new pods.
• Brewer's Conjecture. This is the notion that one of Consistency, Availability or Partition Tolerance has to be traded away when designing distributed/cloud systems.
• Simon Thurman's 20/20 (20 slides lasting 20 seconds each) format session was very successful.
• Thinking about the use of cloud services from an enterprise perspective is a challenge.

I've mentioned that I think there is probably some use in Twitter somewhere before. The jury is still out on this for me. On the one hand, tweeting is very useful as a broadcast mechanism beyond bulk email with less need for context than blogging. But on the other hand, it's hard to follow more than one or two people. So, the value of the broadcast is rendered pointless if you know that there is no-one able to listen...

Seems to me that the best use of Twitter is search.

Possibly more cynically - but amusing nonetheless - is my colleague Simon's view that: "Twitter is SMS for people who don't have any friends".

This seems to be supported by the FriendFeed Imaginary Friend feature...

I meant to post on this a couple of weeks ago, but forgot...

This report on ProgrammableWeb describes the purchase of Twhirl by Seesmic. Nothing strange in an acquisition, but in this case it's interesting that in Twhirl's case we have a lone developer creating something that is effectively just a wrapper over several existing APIs. (No criticism of the application by the way!). So, there's value in the UX etc. but essentially nothing that couldn't be reproduced by another designer/developer. Or at least - there's no special sauce here, how it is done is easily understood.

So why the acquisition?

Loic Le Meur of Seesmic lists 20 reasons why they acquired Twhirl. I agree with most of the reasons listed, but I suspect that the most important is the second on the list:

Thwirl is the #1 and coolest Twitter client with more than 100,000 downloads and 7% of all tweets posted per day

And there we have it: leveraging an existing user base of an already successful service through a very popular tool should drive that user base to Seesmic.

My only concern is that I'm not sure there's enough data to understand the transience of an audience of a given tool. Maybe Twhirl will lose out to some existing or new tool. That could happen really fast too.

On the other hand, there's a significant opportunity for developers to take advantage of this economy (just like Facebook apps!). Similarly, making access to APIs super-simple is key to technology choice for developing these applications:

• LINQ capabilities which make accessing XML-based services a breeze, which leaves more time to get that all-important UX differentiation in place.
• Data-binding capabilities such as those in Silverlight and WPF make the representation and transformation of data to the UI that much faster too.
•  Take a look at this Digg mashup as an example.

Finally, whilst each app is great I really don't want a raft of these applications on my desktop - it'd be great to see something exploiting the .NET 3.5 AddIn capabilities to plug in the various services I use (Digg, Twitter, Delicious etc.) and become the preferred 'container' for a bunch clients...

I think Angus Logan has the best compilation of information and reaction I've seen so far.

It might not surprise you to learn that my main hobby is also 'computer related stuff'. I was reminded of this when being asked to fill out a bit of pre-work for an upcoming 'team building day'. Oh my, that'll be fun then...

Anyhow, Dan sent on a link to the GeekDad blog and suggested I might be interested. Sure am. I was already aware of it (mainly through reading Chris' Long Tail blog, and Wired in general), but Dan spurred me into some action.

Evan was supposed to go to a pirate party this weekend, but was a bit down from her two-month jabs, so we dressed her up anyway, but didn't get to the party. (Present is in the post, Monty).

OK, so Geek Weekend I.

I went out and bought a Bluetooth GPS device: one of those sports tracker things, and signed up for SportsDo. SportsDo are a great example of a S+S style proposition, producing mobile (Windows and Java) software to create 'activities' and then a website to plot the relevant GPS data on Virtual Earth or Google Maps.

Typically this would be used by skiers, cyclists or runners. Now, I don't ski or cycle, but I do run a lot. This is on a machine at the gym at TVP typically though, so not much interesting GPS info. (I guess I could plot my movements around a pool table...).

Anyway, as an experiment, we took the kit shopping and it produced very accurate results. You can even see us meandering up and down the aisles... A lot of fun anyway.

I'll put some more of my journeys on SportsDo at some point.

News from LiveSide that the workspaces are now available in English globally.

Although I'm typically a Groove user, and a bit of a fan, I've been working with the workspaces for a while to good effect.

Worth signing up and having a look-see.

Michael Scherotter keeps a great blog - he strikes me as one of those lucky people who just find coding as easy as conversation. I wish I did.

So amongst the great samples he's done such as: Virtual Earth in Groove, Silverlight in MySpace and so on, I had seen some work he'd done to convert MindManager mind maps to Silverlight applications that can be served from Silverlight Streaming, but just hadn't taken the time to look at it more closely.

What a great piece of work - I love MindManager anyway - but being able to share my MindMaps like this is a cool idea, and a nice piece of experimentation with SL1.0.

Take a look at the series of posts on this. And see my test map below:

My reflection on the last post, and the Live announcements as follows:

Firstly, these are all really positive steps forward for Live, and I think some of the services are really beginning to take shape.

The Windows Live Messenger Library is very interesting. Previously, it's been possible to to create bots, and activities and thus harness Messenger as a channel, or an entry into a web proposition, but WLML now gives the power to use Messenger as part of the proposition: perhaps just for the retention of eyeballs, but maybe for improved social capabilities and other sophistry.

Mentioned in the post, but covered in more detail by Andy Conrad is these services are going to ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria... keep up...) which "means we now support LINQ queries from .NET code directly against our service endpoints". Very cool. I'll be keeping an eye on the MIX session from Pablo on that subject.